The development of the Digital Versatile Disc (“DVD”) as a medium for carrying digital movie and video information has led to a new rental business models that use postal mail for media transport. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,584,450, Method and Apparatus for Renting items, describes a DVD rental service in which a subscriber establishes an online “pick list” of DVD movies that the subscriber wishes to rent. In addition to DVD's such a service may be used to provide video game disks, CD's, CD-ROM's, or any other optical media. When a selected one of the DVD movies on the pick list becomes available in inventory, the service mails the selected DVD movie to the subscriber. The subscriber views the DVD and returns it to the service by mail. When the DVD is received by the service, the subscriber is entitled to receive another available DVD from the pick list.
In the conventional service, much of the work in receiving returned DVD's and sending out new DVD's to customers is done manually. For example, an envelope containing a returned DVD is opened by hand by workers employed by the service. The worker manually scans a code on the DVD packaging to identify the returned DVD and the customer. Some of the returned DVD's will be returned to inventory, however many of the returned DVD's will need to be sent to other customers. The returned DVD's are then manually processed again to determine which are need to be resent to customers, and which should be kept for internal storage or processing. Finally, outgoing DVD's are manually inserted into conventional mailers to be placed for outgoing delivery with the postal or delivery service. To maintain customer satisfaction, rapid processing of these incoming and outgoing DVD's is critical. The extensive manual processing of returned and outgoing DVD's can be time that makes quick and reliable turn-around more difficult.